Top 200 Kate Elizabeth Russell Quotes (2024 Update)
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151. “If I think about how many days lie before me, I end up obsessing over things I know I shouldn’t. Like, maybe being dead isn’t the worst thing. Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad.”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

152. “What would she do? It’s a question that’s more like a maze, one I can get lost in at the sight of any teenage girl. If her teacher tried to touch her, would she react the way she should, shove his hand away and flee? Or would she let her body go limp until he was through? I try sometimes to imagine another girl doing what I did – sink into the pleasure of it, crave it, build her life around it – but I can’t. My brain hits a dead end, the maze swallowed by darkness. Unthinkable. Unspeakable.”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

153. “You were so brave then, more a warrior than a girl. You were my own Joan of Arc, refusing to give in even as the flames licked your feet. Does that bravery exist in you still?”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

154. “You decide what we do.”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

155. “For weeks, every time the phone rang, my body braced itself for the inevitable fallout.”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

156. “It isn’t a question but a realization, like he’s taken a step backward and can now see the doubt that’s begun to sidle up alongside the limits of my loyalty.”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

157. “I don’t feel forced, and I know I have the power to say no, but that isn’t the same as being in charge. But maybe he has to believe that. Maybe there’s a whole list of things he has to believe.”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

158. “I think back to third grade, how it felt to bring home a report card with a teacher’s note scribbled across the bottom: Vanessa is very advanced, seems like she’s eight years old going on thirty. I’m not sure I was ever really a kid at all.”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

159. “I barely opened my mouth and brought us to the brink of disaster.”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

160. “I can see myself at the head of my own classroom, telling my own students what to read and write. Maybe that’s what this has always been about – not wanting these men but wanting to be them.”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

161. “After a while, she gives up repeating the same lines, knowing there comes a point when they no longer matter, that what I need isn’t absolution but to hold myself accountable before a witness.”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

162. “Because if it isn’t a love story, then what is it?” I look to her glassy eyes, her face of wide-open empathy. “It’s my life,” I say. “This has been my whole life.”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

163. “Het moet een liefdesverhaal blijven. Want als het geen liefdesverhaal is, wat is het dan?”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

164. “A few days ago he asked what I like to eat, said he wanted to have my favorites on hand, and he shows me the three pints of expensive ice cream in the freezer, a six-pack of Cherry Coke in the fridge, two big bags of potato chips on the counter.”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

165. “I swallow those words instead. Maybe somewhere in my belly they’ll take root and grow.”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

166. “You can’t do that.” she says. “You don’t get to change the facts to suit the story you want to tell.”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

167. “It’s a truth so blatant and bitter, not even I can sweeten it into something easier to swallow. He only wanted to make sure I’d stay quiet. He used me again.”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

168. “She opens my bottom desk drawer and gasps. It’s full of trash: crumpled papers, food wrappers, used tissues, a blackened banana peel. I’d filled it in a panic a few weeks ago right before room inspections and forgotten to clean it out.”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

169. “Like find my inner child? Oh god. Kill me.”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

170. “I tell Ruby I feel like I’ve moved from grieving Strane to grieving myself. My own death. “Part of you died along with him,” she says. “That seems normal.” “No, not part,” I say. “All of me. Everything about me leads back to him. If I cut out the poison, nothing will be left.”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

171. “I walked into his classroom. I existed. I was born.”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

172. “What conclusion is there to draw besides the obvious? He is Humbert, and I am Delores.”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

173. “Putting in the Seed,” and tells us to read this one.”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

174. “I know to stay away from any books or movies set in a boarding school, but then I’ll be blindsided by something as benign as a reference to maple trees, or the feeling of flannel against my skin. “I sound like I’m crazy,” I say.”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

175. “That means something.”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

176. “I’ve got a good head on my shoulders despite all this. I can take care of myself. Look at me. I’m okay. I’m fine.”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

177. “He’ll never meet you,” I say. It’s a hard truth, carrying within it grief and joy.”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

178. “He says, “It wasn’t the same with them, do you understand? It wasn’t like how it was with you. I loved you, Vanessa. I loved you.”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

179. “I hang up my work suit, take off my makeup, smoke a bowl in bed, and turn off the light. Self-control.”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

180. “It’s strange to know that whenever I remember myself at fifteen, I’ll think of this.”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

181. “I’m unhuman now. Untethered.”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

182. “First love is so special,” she says. “You’ll never forget it.”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

183. “I go on and on, parroting his arguments, the part of him left inside me suddenly risen and fully alive.”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

184. “What about you? Look at you. Aren’t you ok? You certainly look ok. You look beautiful.”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

185. “You don’t get to change the facts to suit the story you want to tell.”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

186. “Ruby’s far off voice asks me where I have gone, but she knows that it’s the truth that has spooked me, the expanse of it, the starkness. It offers nowhere to hide.”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

187. “I feel so strongly toward you,” he says. “Sometimes I worry I’ll drop dead from it. It’s stronger than anything I’ve ever felt for any woman. It’s not even in the same universe of feeling.”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

188. “I’m sorry, Vanessa,” he says. “Though I know that might be a useless thing to hear. I’m just so sorry.”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

189. “Pathetically in love with you.” As soon as he says this, I become someone somebody else is in love with, and not just some dumb boy my own age but a man who has already lived an entire life, who has done and seen so much and still thinks I’m worthy of his love. I feel forced over a threshold, thrust out of my ordinary life into a place where it’s possible for grown men to be so pathetically in love with me they fall at my feet.”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

190. “Really, though, what girl doesn’t? It looms over you, that threat of violence. They drill the danger into your head until it starts to feel inevitable. You grow up wondering when it’s finally going to happen.”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

191. “Ik voel me niet en ik weet dat ik nee kan zeggen, maar dat is niet hetzelfde als de baas zijn.”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

192. “There’s a photo of him onstage accepting the plaque, a big grin on his face, white teeth shining through black beard. I don’t recognize his shoes and his hair is shorter than I’ve ever seen it. Embarrassment creeps up my spine as I realize he probably wasn’t thinking about me at all in that moment. There isn’t a single moment when I’m not thinking about him.”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

193. “I don’t think I remember anything about myself that happened before him.” I let out a laugh, rub my face with both hands. “That’s so depressing.” “It is,” Ruby agrees. “But those years aren’t lost. They’ve just been neglected for a while. You can recover yourself.”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

194. “I wonder if she would be hurt if I said I don’t really feel anything at all towards her anymore. That I can’t remember why losing her friendship had felt like losing the world, or why that friendship seemed so profound, never to be repeated. Now, it only strikes me as embarrassing, like any other outgrown phase.”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

195. “Vanessa, you were young and dripping with beauty. You were teenage and erotic and so alive, it scared the hell out of me.”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

196. “How long were you going to stand there before you said something?”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

197. “What could we have done? We were just girls.”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

198. “Driven toward it, toward him, I was the kind of girl that isn’t supposed to exist: one eager to hurl herself into the path of a pedophile.”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

199. “If there’s one thing you take away from this class, it should be that the world is made of endlessly intersecting stories, each one valid and true.”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell

200. “How easy it is to be tricked into building a narrative out of air. Out of nothing.”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell